


Boys of Summer

by SailorSol



Category: West Wing
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Late Night Conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 19:11:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSol/pseuds/SailorSol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna’s always walked away when she had to. This time isn’t all that different, or at least that's what she wants to tell herself.</p><p>Episode tag to “King Corn”, while Donna is working for the Russell campaign.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boys of Summer

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of nowhere. I've recently rediscovered this show, and I was happy that it lived up to my fond memories.
> 
> Sort of hints at Josh/Donna, except not.

_Out on the road today,_  
 _I saw a BLACK FLAG sticker on a Cadillac_  
 _A little voice inside my head said, “_  
 _Don’t look back, you can never look back.”_  
 _I thought I knew what love was_  
 _What did I know?_  
 _Those days are gone forever_  
 _I should just let them go, but—_  
\-- “Boys of Summer”, by The Ataris

* * *

The phone call came in the middle of the night. Donna was used to middle of the night phone calls, after seven years working at the White House, and she knew how to sound coherent and force herself awake enough to make sense of what was being said to her.

“Donna Moss,” she greeted, because the number on her cell phone wasn’t familiar to her. She squinted at the clock on the nightstand—just before two, so depending on where they were calling from, it might not have occurred to them that she had been sleeping.

“Oh, wow, hi,” the voice on the other end—a man, vaguely familiar, but she wasn’t really quite awake enough to place it—said. “I wasn’t sure I’d found the right number.”

“Who is this?” she asked, shifting up to lean against the headrest, the pillow propping her up.

“Sorry, um, did I wake you? I woke you, didn’t I,” Mystery Man continued with a nervous laugh. “Maybe I should call back.”

She resisted the urge to sigh. “I’m awake now, you may as well just tell me who you are.” Whoever this was, it had nothing to do with the campaign. But she wasn’t going to fall asleep again anytime soon. She tried to tell herself that a little mystery in her life was a good thing, but she’d had quite enough mystery for the day meeting with potential Democratic candidates in Iowa.

“Right, right. I can’t believe… well, I guess it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Eight years now?” the guy said.

It didn’t take much effort for Donna to remember where she’d been eight years ago; almost exactly where she was right now, except she was nothing but a nobody assistant to President Bartlett’s deputy campaign director, and not head of media relations for the Northeast and Midwest on Vice President Russell’s campaign. “I’m sorry, but I really—”

 _No._ She was about to say that she didn’t recognize the voice, but now that she was a little more awake and had the right context, it was coming back to her quickly. “Evan?” she asked.

“The one and only,” her ex-boyfriend replied in that same cocky tone that had drawn her to him in the first place. Of course, back then she’d been starting her junior year of college and didn’t know what real self-confidence looked like. Seven years in the White House had certainly taught her that one.

“What are you doing calling me at two o’clock in the morning?” she asked, leaving off the part about how they hadn’t talked since that day in April she’d walked out of his life for good to beg for her job on the campaign back.

“Funny you should ask that,” Evan said. “I’m in LA these days—well, San Luis Obispo—but I was at the rally a few weeks ago, and I saw you up there with the vice president. And it was all over the news, what happened in Gaza. I was glad to see that you were okay. You still look amazing, you know that?”

Donna frowned. Normally she would find that sort of comment flattering, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about Evan calling her out of the blue and bringing up Gaza with her. She still had nightmares, still felt uncomfortable with big black SUVs, and she didn’t want to think about how the metal pin in her leg would have made campaigning difficult if she’d had to fly commercially everywhere instead of flying on Air Force Two.

“Thanks,” she said warily. “But that still doesn’t explain why you’re calling, Evan.”

“Seeing you in person really brought me back, you know?” Evan said. “And it got me thinking, about us, and about why I let you go.”

 _You didn’t let me go, you jerk. I left you,_ she thought, but bit her lip to keep herself from saying it out loud. She was overworked and overtired, but that didn’t mean she should snap at people on the phone for something that had happened years ago. “That’s really sweet, but couldn’t you have called during the day?”

“Well yeah, I guess so,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Just, I’ve had your number for a while now, and I wasn’t going to call you, and then tonight I was out with some buddies, and we got to talking, and it made me think of you again, and I figured, why not? No time like the present, right?”

_Great, I bet he stopped at the bar on his way to the hospital to talk to them, too. Can this night get any worse?_

She held her breath for a moment, wondering if she’d just incited the wrath from high upon the thing for having such a thought, but after ten seconds passed and no new disaster had suddenly appeared, she exhaled. “I’m sorry, Evan, it’s really great to hear from you,” she lied, “but maybe now isn’t the best time to catch up. I need to be awake in a few hours.”

“So what would be a good time, then?” he asked, not sounding daunted at all by her gentle rejection. “I mean, I called you from my cell, so this is a good number to reach me at whenever. Well, whenever I’m not in with a patient,” he amended.

So she was going to have to do this the hard way; she was getting used to that, these days, with men who weren’t willing to listen to her when she said it was time to move on. She tried not to think too closely about that, about who was in the room just across the hall from hers and how she’d finally had to walk away from him too, the same way she’d walked away from Evan when she realized things weren’t working for her any more. Josh might have made fun of her, all those years ago when she started working on the Bartlett campaign, but she had been the one to walk away from Evan both times, and she had been the one to finally walk away from Josh. So telling Evan to go stuff it again really wasn’t going to be all that hard, especially when he’d been rude enough to wake her up.

“Look, it really was great to hear from you again,” she said. In some ways it was, because once upon a time maybe she would have caved to his advances and gone back, but even this brief conversation had shown her how much she had grown and changed in eight years, and she had nothing left to say to this man she had once thought she might marry. “But I’m not really interested in catching up with you. Good luck with—well, whatever it is you’re doing these days.”

And she hung up before he could say anything. It was no more rude than his timing; it was easy to push aside the guilt as silly and childish. Evan was part of her past, and while he had helped put her on this path, Donna had come to this point on her own.

 _Not on your own_ , a small, traitorous voice said to her. It sounded suspiciously like Charlie, and she had to fight against the sudden urge to cry, pulling her knees up to her chest. She hadn’t talked to most of her friends in the White House since the last time the vice president had returned to Washington. Charlie still sent her the occasional e-mail, but CJ was too busy being the Chief of Staff and Toby was possibly angrier at Donna than Josh was.

She missed her old job. Not all of it, the bits where she played phone tag half the day trying to rearrange Josh’s schedule so he could meet with whoever he needed to meet with to deal with the latest crisis, nor the parts where she had to order lunch or take care of Josh’s dry cleaning or make travel arrangements for trips she wasn’t invited on. But she missed the people, and she missed the days where she really felt like they were making a difference, when she was making a difference.

How many times had Josh come to her for advice? How many times had he talked through problems with her, and she said just the right thing to inspire him? She played an important part in Josh’s job.

But it hadn’t been enough. Hadn’t been enough for a long time, though it wasn’t as obvious at the time as it was in retrospect. It had started with Sam (who still sent her weekly e-mails, even if the content was usually limited to funny cat pictures), and then Charlie finishing his degree. She remembered their conversation in the bullpen, Charlie admitting the promise he’d made to the President and why he didn’t want anyone to know that he was graduating.

She’d thought things were going to change, when Josh handed her the diplomatic passport, that he was finally taking her seriously. But when she finally came back to work, things hadn’t changed at all. And that was when she knew it was time.

And maybe it was better that Josh had cancelled all the lunches she had scheduled for them. She wasn’t sure she could have looked him in the eye and told him she was leaving, not when a part of her had still hoped he would change. It was the same reason she’d gone back to Evan, and ultimately the same reason she had left again.

But the difference between Evan and Josh was that if Josh had asked her to stay— _asked_ her, not just steamrolled over her with his assumptions that she was bluffing—she wouldn’t have walked away. And if he’d asked her to come back, she would have, every single time.

The clock glowed brightly, informing her that it was now just after two-thirty. If she was lucky, she might actually get to sleep for the next three hours before her wake-up call. She slouched back down under the blankets, facing away from the clock. The light from the hallway traced the door, a beacon pointing her towards Josh’s room. Eight years ago, she probably wouldn’t have thought twice about knocking on his door and making him share in her misery of being woken up.

But if she had learned anything from Josh in the last eight years, it was to never let the past get in the way of the future. Even if it meant walking away from her best friend.


End file.
